Of course its still useful for a GUI application. Think of the support request:
"I do something and it does something unusual"You cannot reproduce what they report, what do you do to help them? If logging is implemented then a log file can be produced and sent to you.
Logging is great in this respect as internally in the application you just use a logger, the configuration tells it what should be done with the logging information.
Michael Whapples On 28/02/11 12:56, John J. Boyer wrote:
I'm wondering how important logging is for an application that is primarily a GUI. Of course it also has command-line functions. Lotting might be nice to use with CLI. John On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 07:29:52AM -0500, Sina Bahram wrote:Log4j is really easy to use though, and is rather wonderful for logging, if that's what's necessary of course. Take care, Sina -----Original Message----- From: brailleblaster-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:brailleblaster-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael Whapples Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 5:36 AM To: brailleblaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [brailleblaster] Re: Debugging Might you really be wanting logging? The java logging API in the JDK will probably be sufficient although there are alternatives like log4j, etc. Logging has much finer control over what error messages get output and where they go (eg. levels like finest, finer, fine, config, info, warning and severe). I think extra custom levels can be defined although the documentation seems to advise against that unless really needed. Also logging allows you to have multiple loggers which can be set to log at different levels (eg. the documentation suggests a logger per class). Also it is worth noting the following usage: if (logger.isLoggable(Level.FINE)) { logger.log(Level.FINE, "Message to be logged"); } While the log method of the Logger class will test if the level allows logging out, the additional if statement may improve performance as it saves any preparation to construct the message (eg. concatenation of strings). Configuration of the logging API can be done using system properties or a properties file. Also logging was mentioned before to you. Generally logging is easiest to implement at the time of writing the code rather than to add it in later. Michael Whapples On 28/02/11 08:09, John J. Boyer wrote:First, in response to Michael's last message, BrailleBlaster will present the user with a dialog box asking if she wants to continue, change settings read a startup tutorial, see a quick-start guide, etc. Finallyt it will have a checkbox with the message "Do not show me this message again." On to debugging. Can I call BrailleBlaster with the command: java -Ddebug=yes -jar brailleblaster.jar and later have the code String debug System.getProperty ("debug") The immediate reason for this is that I catch the UnsatisfiedLinkError exception if the liblouisutdml library is not found and set a boolean for the rest of the program. However this error could also be caused if one of its dependencies is not found. In this case I want to see the message. There will certainly be other reasons for wanting a debug flag. Thanks, John
